Global tourism has growth to a level that questions the current and future sustainability of the industry and its impacts for our environment. While the developmental aspects of tourism have been largely based on the scale of visitors flows, there is an increasing need to think the limits to growth in tourism and alternative development paradigms for future tourism. This kind of questioning of the impacts of growth, in general, is not new (First Report to the Club of Rome, 1972; First World Climate Conference [Geneva] 1979; Brundtland Report 1987), but there are new ways to reconceptualise alternative futures for development. In tourism, one of the recently emerged idea is based on a degrowth thinking in economic and social development discussion in the 2000s (Latouche, 2022; Bernard et al., 2003).

The degrowth term is not solely to be taken in its literal sense as a reversal of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) curve. As it also holds a symbolic sense, encapsulating the idea of “moving away from the ideology of growth, in other words, productivism” (Latouche, 2022, p. 4). In this respect, our societies are coming to terms with the fact that development models based on growth have reached their limits, both environmentally (air and soil pollution, etc.), climatically (models based on the exploitation of fossil fuels) and socially (concentration of wealth, inequalities). The ideology that economic growth and technical progress are the only remedy for global change ignores the fact that six of the nine planetary limits have already been exceeded (Rockström et al., 2009). At the same time, the scientific community (Parrique, 2022; Lamb and Steinberger, 2017) maintains that indicators such as GDP avoid the negative consequences of development centered on the economic dimension. In this context, the degrowth paradigm has emerged as a radical critique of productivism and developmentalism (Latouche, 2003), while at the same time proposing an alternative societal project in response to the crisis of development (ecological, ideological, social, etc.) (Morin, 2014). “Furthermore, it is necessary to distinguish between sudden degrowth, caused by various crises (which could be likened to a recession), and “deliberate degrowth,” characterised as desirable and serene (Latouche, 2022, p. 12). Degrowth must be the subject of conscious reflection on the needs and well-being of the population (Rognon, 2009), and represents “a strategy that aims to achieve a theoretical economic size that guarantees well-being and social justice (the social floor) without exceeding the carrying capacity of ecosystems (the ecological ceiling)” (Parrique, 2022, p. 220).

Until recently, tourism was not really at the center of degrowth research (Bourdeau et al., 2008, Hall, 2009). However, in recent years, this paradigm has been incorporated into the tourism phenomenon, leading to social movements and numerous debates in the media and within the academic field, notably giving rise to the publication of two books: “Tourism and Degrowth—Towards a Truly Sustainable Tourism” (2020) and “Degrowth and Tourism—New Perspectives on Tourism Entrepreneurship, Destinations and Policy” (2020). Mass tourism, which is intrinsically linked to the growth of the capitalist economy, leads to the over-consumption of natural resources, thereby helping to exceed planetary limits (Hall, 2009; Saarinen, 2020). The “need” for mobility is a major contributor to exceeding global limits, as it is the direct result of tourism and the main impact of this sector on the climate. The local population has also expressed its dissatisfaction with the excesses of tourism development. For example, in 2017, Barcelona City Council took the urgent decision to adopt a new urban development plan that prohibited the opening of new hotels in the city center, due to “tourism-related property pressure” (García-Hernández and de Miguel, 2021). This event was echoed around the world, prompting a number of tourism authorities to rethink their economic development model, which until then had focused on the growth and tourism of urban centers. This model has led to the phenomenon of overtourism, which can be defined as “the excessive growth of visitors leading to overcrowding in areas where residents suffer the consequences of temporary and seasonal tourism peaks, which have enforced permanent changes to their lifestyles, access to amenities and general well-being” (Milano et M Cheer, 2019). Over the last ten years, many researchers have attempted to study the phenomenon to understand how such a level of saturation in many “tourist” areas has been reached (Gwiazdzinski et al., 2019; Gwiazdzinski, 2018; Vlès, 2021b). At the heart of this discussion, the negative impacts of growth are prompting authors to question the possibility of growth being “sustainable”, and this criticism also affects so-called “sustainable“ tourism (Andriotis, 2021; Fletcher et al., 2019; Saarinen, 2020). In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic has also highlighted the vulnerability of some of these areas, with sharp falls in tourist activity, and the need to build more resilient proposals to deal with the challenges of global change (environmental, climatic, societal, social, etc.) (Andriotis, 2021).

Concerning mountain areas, the opposition to certain infrastructure projects began to emerge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Particularly noteworthy are movements against projects such as the rejection of the po and the critique of the growth-based ideology underlying the winter sports development model, which gained momentum in the early 1970s (Cognat, 1973; Arnaud, 1975; Krippendorf, 1977). These challenges remain relevant today (Vlès, 2021b; Bourdeau, 2021). Although tourism has been a powerful lever in the modernisation of mountain regions (Boujrouf et al. 1998; Bonnemains, 2015), this development model is being called into question because of its environmental, climatic and social impact. However, most of the research carried out to date on degrowth has focused on urban destinations that have suffered from the effects of tourism overpopulation, and little of it has focused on mountain areas. In this call for papers, the focus is on mountain regions, whose specific characteristics (climatic, environmental, socio-economic, etc.) make them particularly vulnerable to global change and “more exposed to natural hazards and risks” (Vlès, 2019, p. 75). Tourism, and more specifically the exploitation of snow, has created a mono-economy, leading to a headlong rush into tourism development (Bourdeau, 2009; Bonnemains 2015). This growth-based development model is being undermined not only by global warming but also by changes in society (Clivaz et al., 2015; Vlès, 2021a; Balaguer, 2020). Degrowth, which establishes a better balance between the use of resources and human activities, implies “reimagining” economic, political, and social relations to ensure that humanity remains within the limits of planetary capacities. This would mean moving from a paradigm centered on tourism development to a model that considers the habitability of these territories (Bourdeau, 2021).

The aim of this call for papers is to explore a field that has as yet been little explored by researchers, namely the application of the concept of degrowth, and the various approaches and initiatives that it may encompass, to mountain tourism. We are looking for contributions from various disciplines in the social sciences, which may focus on theoretical and conceptual aspects and/or be based on case studies carried out in mountain areas, if possible, from a comparative perspective.

Expected contributions may concern the following areas (without being exhaustive):

• the heuristic and analytical scope of the concept of degrowth in a mountain tourism context

• the place of tourism in mountain areas in the face of the effects of climate change

• the role of tourism in mountain regions in terms of the well-being of permanent and temporary, human and non-human populations

• degrowth as a reaction and response to “overtourism”

• alternative social initiatives and projects that use the concept of degrowth to think and do tourism differently.

• the role of stakeholders (tourism professionals, elected representatives, visitors, local populations, etc.) in degrowth tourism initiatives and projects in mountain areas

• the issues involved in the spatial and temporal deconcentrating of visitors as a response to the over-frequentation of certain resorts or tourist sites

• protest movements against the construction of major new tourist infrastructures in the mountains (hotel complexes, reservoirs, cable cars, etc.) and their relationship with the idea of degrowth

• degrowth as a new “imaginaire” for mountain tourism.

Timeline

Article proposals, around 1,000 words in length, should be sent in either French (if the author is a native French speaker) or English (if the author’s mother tongue is any other language) by 1st of December 2024 to Morgane Müller-Roux (morgane.muller.1@unil.ch) as well as the editorial team, addressed to Cristina Del Biaggio (cristina.del-biaggio@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr) and Maxime Frezat (m.frezat@protonmail.com).

Final articles are expected by 1st of May 2025. Final articles must be submitted in one of the languages in which the review is published: Alpine languages (French, Italian, German, Slovenian), Spanish or English. The author must see to it that the article is to be translated into the second language after it has been assessed.

Publication of the articles is scheduled for March 2026.

We also welcome contributions linked to the thematic of this special issue for the thematic sections of the journal, details of which can be found on the journal website:
Transitions https://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/rga/11018
Localities https://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/rga/10516
Mountains in fiction https://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/rga/11244